After Rain
by LoquaciousQuark
Summary: A sequel to In Salt and Gold. Hawke and Fenris have returned to Kirkwall, but there's no such thing as a normal life and "home" is more elusive than they expect. Some scars are more than skin-deep. Hawke/Fenris, complete.
1. part one

**AN: **Oh my goodness, it's not a kmeme fill? No, my friends, it is not_—_or at least, not directly. Hawke and Fenris simply had more to their story than I was able to fit in the original fill, and when one of my closest friends asked me to continue it, I couldn't _not_ say yes. This directly follows _In Salt and Gold, _so I would recommend reading that fic first. I hope you enjoy!

-.-

**After Rain**  
><em>part one<em>

-.-

for Hikki

-.-

And yet, and yet,- -  
>Seeing the tired city, and the trees so still and wet,- -<br>It seemed as if all evenings were the same;  
>As if all evenings came,<br>Despite her smile at thinking of a kiss,  
>With just such tragic peacefulness as this;<br>With just such hint of loneliness or pain;  
>The perfect quiet that comes after rain.<p>

_-Evensong_, Conrad Aiken

-.-

The door opens with a soft, protesting groan.

Fenris pauses in the doorway, the Kirkwall sun still warm on the back of his neck as he looks into the half-shadowed ruin of his foyer. Three months he has been gone and nothing has changed, _nothing—_here is the moldering armor still piled in the corner; here is the broken flagstone that Hawke trips over every time she visits; here is the layer of dust so thick on his unused lamps that it swirls up in angry, glittering whirlwinds at the breath of his entry as if the mansion itself resents the interruption of its solitude.

He decides that is appropriate. Fenris steps into the gloom, letting the dust settle grudgingly around his bare toes, and lets the door fall closed behind him.

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sudden dimness, but his feet need no such consideration; even after everything that has passed he still remembers his way through the cracked and fractured halls he has lived in for six years, and he moves unerringly up the chipped stone stairs to the one room of the house he has ever used with any regularity. Sunlight falls in straight, cool shafts from the grated ceiling as he crosses the landing, the only witness to his return to this place that still does not feel like home.

Even his room is untouched. Fenris does not know why this surprises him as he surveys the tattered drapes, the windows thick with grime, the blankets and furs piled haphazardly before his unswept fireplace; from here he can even see his little pot of armor polish on the flagstones at the end of the bench, just as he'd left it the morning he'd meant to meet his sister with what little pride in his appearance he could manage. He did not have the means to give her riches—he'd thought at least to give her a brother she could look at without shame.

"Irony of ironies," he says aloud, the sound falling dead in the still air around him, and plucks the polish from the ground to replace it on his mantle. In truth, he has more pity than hatred for Varania now; she made her choices with open eyes, and the magister whose mercy she so craved is dead along with all her hopes.

_Danarius _is dead.

His claws dig into the wood of the mantle at the sudden thought. It shocks him every time, the realization that his master is no longer walking in this world, no longer hunting him and those who gave him harbor—he is, in every sense of the word, _free. _

And he feels nothing like it.

That, Fenris thinks, is the problem. He has killed his master with his own two hands, felt the man's rotting heart quiver and die between his fingers like a rabbit in a snare, and _still _he cannot shake the quiet terror that one day he will wake in that thin cot with the high barred window, that Hawke will again turn to him with blank eyes and not know him. He is as unchanged as his mansion, a slave hiding under the dust of old habits and old fears, unmoved and unaffected even by something as enormous as Danarius's death.

Fenris turns on his heel, stalking out of his rooms without touching another thing. It has, after all, managed without him for three months; it will manage a little longer.

-.-

His feet lead him toward Hawke's estate without conscious thought. Indeed, her door is within sight by the time he realizes where he has been heading, and when the belated recognition occurs to him Fenris curses and stops in his tracks. A woman with an enormous basket over her arm lets out an impatient sight as she veers to one side to avoid running into his back, but Fenris pays her no mind, beyond irked with himself. Hawke had declared only an hour ago that she had every intention of going straight to bed and sleeping for two days; he'd resolved quite firmly not to disturb her, and _still _he finds this is the first place he turns to ease his disquiet.

He doesn't begrudge her the rest, of course—she'd been weaving on her feet as they'd disembarked from Isabela's ship that morning, unsteady from more than three weeks spent at sea, and at her side Fenris, too, had been dazed with weariness and the sheer impossibility of finding themselves in Kirkwall again, _together. _He'd knocked sideways into Hawke more than once as they'd walked through the docks, exhausted and so dizzy with disbelief that he hadn't been able to string two coherent thoughts together outside of _sleep now _and _sleep more._ Even now, fatigue presses hard behind his eyes as he steps out of the pompous bustling of the Hightown streets, as if to remind him of how long it has been since he truly rested. Two months—three? No, he thinks as he leans against a wall under a patch of hanging ivy, longer still than that—even before Varania came he had slept poorly, anxious and eager and certain that every morning brought both betrayal and fulfilled hopes.

Fenris crosses his arms and lets his head tip back until it rests on white, sun-warmed stone, choosing to let that thought drift away without pursuit. Kirkwall breathes around him and he focuses on that instead, on the bright silks draped orange and gold and cobalt blue in the brilliant mid-morning sun, on the steady stream of babbling voices that catches him up in their current as if to remind him that even this wretched city knows the comfortable touch of contentment.

His eyes lift involuntarily to the high and narrow windows of Hawke's estate across the square, seeking out by habit the ones that look into her chamber—but when the crimson curtains drawn across them flutter with a movement inside, he drops his gaze with an impatient sigh and shifts against the wall. Orana's bustling, he's sure, proof enough that Hawke is asleep; he will _not_ disturb her, even if the memory of her warmth pulls at him like a half-heard song, quiet and insistent—no_. _He will give her this peace. He had said he wanted to see to his home and she'd let him go without a word; it is hardly her fault that he cannot bear the stolid silence of his stolen manor at the moment, and if that means he has to wander the streets a little longer without rest—

"Ooh, what's this? Should I tell Hawke there's an elf-shaped ghost haunting her doorstep?"

Fenris cracks an eye open, unsurprised to find Isabela standing far too close for comfort, her head cocked sideways to peer under his hair. "Isabela."

She grins at his tone and straightens, and the sun catches like fire on the edges of her earrings. "And hello to you too, you silver-tongued charmer. Is there a reason you're out here playing statue, or did you just decide it was time to frighten the Kirkwall gentry with black looks and lots of leather? Because that sounds like fun, even if it's not quite working." Isabela jerks a thumb over her shoulder and Fenris sees a group of young nobles' daughters staring at him from across the street, clustered around a merchant selling semiprecious stones. When they notice his attention, one of them whispers to the others and all four burst into peals of embarrassed giggles.

Fenris suppresses the urge to snarl and looks away instead. He has had more than enough of foolish women admiring him like an exotic and dangerous pet, enough for a lifetime and longer. Even the silent oppression of his manor would be preferable to this scrutiny, and without a word he pushes away from the wall and turns back the way he came.

Isabela falls into step with him, slinging a casual arm over his shoulder, and a girl's faint and disappointed sigh carries to his ears with the wind. "You're not going in to see Hawke?" she asks.

He shakes his head. "She should sleep."

"Tch. I can think of worse ways to wake up." Her grin is more a leer, but she doesn't resist when he shrugs her arm off his shoulders. "Not that it'd matter," she adds more seriously as they round the corner into the quieter courtyard of the Chantry, "since Hawke's out like a light anyway. I can't imagine her waking up until afternoon tomorrow the way I left her snoring."

Fenris bites back his first thought—_Hawke doesn't snore—_and says instead, "You have just come from her estate, then?"

A pinched-looking Chantry mother purses her lips in disapproval at Isabela's bare legs. The pirate grins and adds a saucier shimmy to her hips in response. "Put her to bed myself."

"Did you?" Fenris says after a moment, forcing his voice to evenness, though Isabela's side-eyed glance tells him that at least to her, he is as transparent as glass.

"Look at those ears," she murmurs with a poorly-hidden smile, "lobster-red and glowing. Oh, unprickle your spikes, pet, I only made sure she was comfortable. Sometimes people rattle around in those big houses, you know, after they've come off long trips in tiny cabins. Especially," she adds, smile widening to a smirk, "when a cabin meant for one holds two instead."

Fenris trips over the last step up.

Isabela laughs, then, long and loud, and skips ahead of him to his mansion's front door, throwing it open without so much as a by-your-leave and striding in as if she belongs there. Fenris follows more slowly, his ears burning now with embarrassment rather than misplaced jealousy, and the sudden chill shadows of his manor do absolutely nothing to cool them.

"What, no biting retort? No 'silence, wench?'" Isabela's voice floats down from his upper story as he begins climbing the steps after her, and he can see her peering at her reflection in the dented copper surface of a shield held by one of the broken statues outside his bedroom door.

"I am—this is not open for discussion."

She throws a pout over her shoulder. The dented shield distorts her reflection, swelling her bottom lip to twice its normal size and flattening her nose against her face. "No details? Not even for me?"

"No."

"Are you serious? You finally sort out your shit after three _years _and get back together with Hawke—_and _under the most intriguing circumstances, might I add—and now you won't tell me anything?"

"_No_."

"Hmph. That's the last time _I_ sail halfway across the world to save a friend from an evil, blood-magicky magister and his evil, blood-magicky mansion."

His mouth curves into an unwilling smile at that. Isabela is irrepressible, even now, and somehow her unfettered impudence presses back the shadows of his mansion, eases the thickness in the air like a window opened to a summer breeze. "I did thank you for that," he says.

Isabela scoffs and waves one hand dismissively between them. "As if _that _matters. Romping took place on my ship—_my ship!—_and I wasn't invited. This is a travesty of the highest order. I feel like someone should be flogged."

A tiny frisson of memory skitters through his mind at that—_Hawke drops her forehead against the floor, digging her weight into the base of the column she is tied to as if that might ease her misery—blood spatters the marble floor, the white column she kneels against—Hawke's blood, drawn by his hand_—and Fenris shakes his head sharply at thought and the sentiment alike to disperse them both into thin air. Amusement gone, he strides over and flings open the door to his room, hardly caring that Isabela follows him in like a curious cat, prowling around the edges of the dusty chamber and poking her nose into his pot of armor polish on the mantle as if it might be cream. He'd stashed a quarter-bottle of wine somewhere on the other side of the armchair when he'd left all those months ago—it is far too early in the day to be drinking, he knows, but he is frustrated and _exhausted _and the memories are more than he can stand right now, and when he fishes the corked bottle out from under the chair, he does not pause before taking a long draw.

He hears Isabela snort at his elbow, and then before he can protest her tanned fingers are pulling the bottle away from him and pushing him down into the armchair in a cloud of glinting dust. She throws him an inscrutable look, one hand on her hip, and when Fenris scowls she rolls her eyes and tips the bottle up to her mouth, finishing off the last of the wine in three swallows as if making some kind of _point. _

She wipes her lips on the back of her hand and sets the empty bottle on the mantle next to his armor polish. "Drowning your sorrows already? There's still so much daylight left for things to go wrong in."

"Small comfort," he says with less irritation than he means, and wonders if it would be too much effort to fetch another bottle from the cellar. He doesn't remember this chair being quite so comfortable.

"Aw, how cute. You're doing the same thing Hawke was."

"Hawke?"

She flaps a hand. "You know, that 'hiding-pain-behind-humor' bit. You haven't got the humor quite down yet, though—Hawke's a good bit better at that part than you—but the brooding pain thing? Definitely your niche."

The thought makes his heart twist. Hawke in pain, Hawke _laughing _through her pain—and Fenris nowhere to be found, too selfish to spare a quarter-hour to make sure she was resting properly. He leans back in the chair, a humorless smile quirking his mouth. As if he could presume to comfort her anyway, after everything he has done to her, has _allowed _to be done to her. He considers it a small miracle she hasn't yet chased him from her side—though he knows that even now he will stand there without hesitation, without doubt, for as long as she allows it.

Isabela watches him, her arms crossed over her chest where she leans against the mantle, and Fenris realizes she is waiting for a response. "I am not hiding any pain."

She laughs outright. "Of course not, pet. And I'm the queen of Antiva." She capitulates, though, and doesn't press, and when Fenris fails to suppress a yawn Isabela turns the conversation to safer things, letting her voice and his fill up the last cobwebbed rafters of his home-that-is-not-a-home until there is no trace of that heavy silence left to choke him.

He doesn't even notice falling asleep in the armchair.

-.-

_"Do you know, my little wolf, that I begin to suspect you are unhappy with your gift?"_

_"Master?"_

_The world is: narrowed eyes, white teeth bared in a smile—cold, cold fingers sliding down the back of his neck under his jerkin to brush against the lyrium there in both promise and warning—the press of too-gentle lips against the tip of his ear, the whispered murmur of a lover stirring his hair. "Spare me your feigned ignorance, Fenris. I am not an unobservant man. I see how little you have her do; I see the sinecures you _do_ give her, and I must say—I am quite tired of it."_

_"Master, I—"_

_The world is: long, thin, fishbone fingers curled over his mouth, a sharp-nailed thumb slipping between his lips just far enough for him to taste the cloves left over from dinner. "Be quiet, please, while I am speaking. I simply wished to tell you: if you fail to make good use of my gift, I will find someone who will. Do you understand?"_

_The hand slides away; he bends forward at the waist and says, "Yes, Master."_

_His master's robes swish as he steps back, satisfaction uncurling across his face—a jointed doll takes his place, then, a life-sized marionette with knotted strings that falls to her knees at his feet and stares up at him with Hawke's face. He hears himself say, "The master is chilled. Build a fire," and the doll nods; he sees that he holds the other end of her strings, so he raises his hands and drags her across the room to the hearth. It takes her three tries to strike flint, and on the third try a tiny spark catches in the dry and half-rotted logs left in the half-swept ashes. The Hawke-doll waits only long enough to see that the fire is taking, and then she folds herself up into a jumble of joints and limbs and knotted string and collapses into the fireplace._

_The flames lick up her leg greedily, wrap around her waist and arms in a violent caress, crack the delicate paint of her face into spiderwebs. He stands there and watches her burn._

_"I'm so sorry, Master," she tells him in Hawke's voice, bubbling up through heat-blistered lips. "Please, please—forgive me—"_

Fenris bolts upright.

His room—he is in his room, he realizes, sprawled in his pile of blankets and furs before the empty fireplace fully-clothed, sweating and shaking and alone in the light of early morning. He blinks twice, his mind a white-fogged muddle of dusty rooms and old wine and Isabela's voice—and the fog clears with the sudden rush of memory. Isabela had talked him to sleep—and that in itself is an inexcusable lapse on his part—but he'd woken later in the evening, the room dim with starlight and dust, and he'd stayed conscious just long enough to stumble from the chair to the furs on the floor. The room has lightened again with day, though, the sun bright enough through his shredded curtains to hurt his eyes, and barely mindful of his gauntlets, Fenris presses a shaking hand over his face.

_Please, please—forgive me—_

"Stop," Fenris says aloud through his fingers, the sound echoing for a moment around him, and surges to his feet. "Enough," he adds more sharply, as if the dream's wisps might be dispersed with words alone, but when he pulls his hand away from his face it is slick with sweat and fear. There is a basin of fresh rainwater on a broken desk by the window, meant to catch the drips from one of the holes in his roof; Fenris sheds his gauntlets and his tunic in short, jerking motions and splashes his face thoroughly before upending the entire basin of cool water over his head.

The shock of it helps to wake him a little—what helps more is the realization that there are voices coming from downstairs.

"…even here?"

"It doesn't count as breaking and entering if you don't _break _anything, big girl." _Isabela_, Fenris realizes, and eases his white-knuckled grip on the basin.

Then Aveline's voice again: "Try that on me when I'm in uniform and see how far it gets you."

"Oh, I will, _trust _me."

"Not half as far as I could throw you."

A scoff. "You know, that's your problem. You're always so upright and _uptight _it's like you've got an iron poker up your ass. If you'd learn to bend a little—where are you off to, Hawke?"

_Hawke_. Hawke is—here? Fenris starts to run a hand through his hair in distraction before he remembers his gauntlets; he lowers his hands to dangle uselessly at his side, unsure what to say, what to _do, _but before he can decide on a course of action her voice floats through his closed door much nearer than the others'. His stomach lurches like a ship at sea.

"I'm just going to see if he's upstairs. Give me a second—I'll be right down."

"Not like I haven't seen those dusty statues before!"

The tarnished bronze handle turns and the door opens. Hawke's head is turned over her shoulder to answer Isabela, one hand still resting on the knob, so Fenris glimpses first the dark, high-collared coat that covers her from chin to knee over black trousers and boots, bound at the waist with a wide red sash. He hasn't seen these robes in years—she'd said once they made her look grimmer than a Chantry sister in Seheron—but with her old robes vanished during their voyage to Minrathous, he supposes she has little choice.

And then Hawke turns to face him and he forgets about her robes entirely.

"Oh," she says, eyes wide with genuine surprise. "You _are_ here."

"Is he there?"

She leans back through the doorway without looking away from him. "Yes, he's here—we'll be down in a minute. Don't break anything."

"There's nothing left _to _break—"

Isabela's voice cuts off with the click of the door closing. Hawke leans back against it, a smile curving her lips. "Hi."

Her voice. Her _smile, _unmarred by fire or fear, and suddenly in the face of it his nightmares seem so very unimportant. "Hawke," he says and takes a step towards her; she pushes away from the door and comes the rest of the way to meet him, sliding both arms around his neck and pressing a gentle, playful kiss to the end of his nose. Then she pulls a face and takes a step back, and he smirks to see the damp patches on either shoulder of her coat.

She says, "You're wet."

Fenris raises an eyebrow without releasing her waist. "So are you, it seems."

"And whose fault is that, my darling?" Hawke mutters with false sweetness, brushing ineffectually at the fabric before Fenris takes her chin between his finger and thumb and kisses her properly.

Her eyes fall closed; Fenris grins and says against her mouth, "Mine."

"Yes," Hawke breathes, and for a moment Fenris is not sure what she is agreeing to—and then her eyes snap open and she puts both hands on his bare chest to push him back, laughing. "Fenris! I came here for a _reason."_

"Other than allowing Isabela free rein of my foyer."

She nods. "You really didn't hear us knocking?"

"I was—asleep."

"You've never been _that _deep a sleeper." Hawke draws her thumb over his forehead and down his cheek, her fingers warm through the water still lingering on his skin. Then, with that perceptiveness that no longer surprises him, she asks, "Bad dreams?"

Fenris glances away. "Yes."

Hawke pauses a moment more, her eyes searching his face—but she does not press him, and when a faint crash echoes up from downstairs, she claps her hands and brightens considerably. "Well, throw off the gloomy spectres of the Fade, my sour-faced friend, because I have a job for us that's going to be so exciting, so downright _thrilling _that I just know you'll be chipper and cheery as you've ever been by the time we're through with it."

Fenris had learned at the very beginning of their acquaintanceship that Hawke's enthusiasm for a task often ended up rather the inverse of his own. He tries anyway. "Slavers?"

"_So_ close. Shopping!"

Fenris sighs. "And you…wish me to come on this ill-fated venture."

"You don't know it's ill-fated! It could be perfectly—good-fated. Well-fated?" Her fingers skate up the lyrium over his sternum, sending a little white spark shivering up his throat. "Pleasant, anyway."

He catches her hand in his, unable to hide his reflexive swallow. "Unless you wish to save this venture—ill-fated or otherwise—for another day, _stop, _Hawke."

She grins and drops her hands to her sides. "Does that mean you're coming?"

As if there had ever been another option from the first moment she'd walked through his door. "Unfathomably so."

"You're a champion, Fenris."

"And your flattery is transparent."

Hawke laughs. "As if you mind."

His lips twitch into an answering smile as she unearths his tunic from his nest of furs and tosses it to him. She isn't wrong, after all. "And the quarry?"

"Finery, I'm afraid."

He pauses with one arm still out of the sleeve. "Finery."

"There's a thing. A welcome-home gala…thing. For the Champion."

Her voice is chagrined, but Fenris can hear the hidden anticipation behind it as he pulls his tunic on. "I do hear they require formal attire at those events."

"Lace trappings and everything," she says as she crosses back towards him; her fingers do up the toggles on the front of his jerkin with practiced deftness, and when she reaches the last one under his jaw she lets her hands slide up to cup his face with a tenderness that is nearly painful. "It's just—such a _normal _thing to do. With you. Does that make sense?"

He leans forward until his head bumps against hers. "I understand, Hawke."

Hawke rests there a moment, her eyes closed, then pulls back with a smile. "Well, come on then," she says, holding out a hand for him to take, and Fenris steps forward.

-.-

This is how Fenris ends up in a private suite of one of Hightown's most exclusive boutiques, crammed into an undersized, gold-striped chair while a flock of attendants swoop around Hawke and Aveline for more than an hour, draping yards of fabric around them like a pair of entertainers' tents. A short, blonde elf holds up a bit of ribbon against Aveline's cheek and coos and somehow, Fenris suspects Aveline's faint blush has very little to do with the overwarm shop.

Isabela leans one elbow on a mannequin squeezed into a truly improbable corset. "It's puce."

"It's _mauve._"

"If that's mauve, then I'm the Revered Mother. Don't you think, Hawke?"

"Maker, I don't know. It just looks pink to me."

Aveline huffs and Isabela lets out a very pronounced _tch,_ and after a furious but silent salvo, Aveline vanishes into the fitting rooms after the chattering attendant with a long and undeniably puce skirt fluttering behind her. Isabela rolls her eyes and pulls on another enormous hat, nearly stabbing Hawke in the ear with the bowsprit of the tiny replica ship crowning the brim. _Normal_, Fenris thinks, and sighs.

Hawke drops down next to him. "This was such a mistake," she groans. "I should have just had something ordered."

The delicate little chair creaks dangerously as Fenris shifts his weight. "It is not the most tedious thing I have ever endured," he offers. In truth, it has really been rather entertaining; he cannot remember the last time he saw Aveline in a dress, and the atrocities Isabela had chosen to model for their little party had produced as much laughter as horrified gasps—he thinks in particular of a brilliant yellow dress with more layers than some cakes he's seen—and when he compares the sight of Hawke in a well-fitted gown to the moldering skeletons in his foyer, Fenris supposes he has spent mornings in worse circumstances.

"Oh, _thanks._ But—I know. Let Aveline try on that other blue thing she's got in there and we'll go. I'll just ask Jean-Luc to take in that green dress with the sash I wore last year; nothing's fit right since Minrathous."

She says it easily, _lazily, _her arms crossed over her chest as she watches Isabela change out the ship-hat for a turban with a fistful of white feathers rising out of an enormous paste sapphire set in the center. Her face is relaxed, her eyes calm—but Fenris knows that under her flippancy she is as restless as he, the both of them caught in the tilted, stilting steps of half-forgotten habits, the once-easy routines now so unfamiliar they might as well have been meant for another life altogether. They both have scars from Minrathous, Fenris thinks; Hawke simply hides hers in a high-collared coat and a smile.

A smile that vanishes as she hears an anxious clucking approaching from the other side of the shop, and within ten seconds, another of Jean-Luc's shop-girls has materialized to hover at Hawke's elbow. "Are you _sure_ you don't want to try anything else_, _messere? There's a lovely taffeta in the back all done in cream and silver beading—it'd look _exquisite _with your hair—maybe a little diamond tiara? Nothing too gaudy, of course, but the Champion needs something truly magnificent—"

Hawke laughs. "Thank you, but I think that's a little—flashy for me. We're just going to wait for my friend and go."

"Are you _quite _certain? How do you feel about satin? We just got in a truly stunning _jupe trompette _from Orlais in the most wonderful deep azure blue—it's got these clever little roses made out of ivory lace at the waist. _Do _let me show you."

A glimmer of the Champion's ire lights in Hawke's eyes as she opens her mouth, but before she can get a word out Isabela interrupts them both from across the room. "Hey, Hawke, come here. Have a look at this."

The shop-girl watches Hawke in despair as she pushes away and joins Isabela at a little dress rack in a corner, and then her eyes turn pleadingly to Fenris as if he might intervene and force Hawke into the truly stunning _jupe trompette_. "I do not command her," he says, shrugging, and the girl droops.

There's suddenly a furious rustle of silk and crinoline at Isabela and Hawke's rack, and then Hawke's head pops around the corseted mannequin with suspiciously flushed cheeks. "I'm going to, ah, try this on, Fenris. I'll just be a moment, okay?"

He settles back into the chair and raises his eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yes. So just…wait."

"As I have been. For the last—" he glances at the sun streaming in through the shopfront windows in feigned pique, "—hour."

"Exactly." She grins as Isabela whisks the dress into one of the fitting rooms—Fenris catches a glimpse of dark red organza—and then, laughing, the pirate pulls Hawke in after her. "Five minutes!" Hawke says, and the curtain swishes shut behind her.

"Ah—excuse me—" the shop-girl says to Fenris, looking a bit stunned. "I'm going to see if they need any help. Those buttons can be a bit—fiddly—" She flits away after them, the rings on the curtain clinking together like bells, and Fenris smirks.

And then he hears the girl's voice from behind the curtain, loud and startled and tinged with outright fear, carrying through the sudden silence like breaking glass. "By the name of the Maker. Your _back._"

His amusement vanishes. He should have known—he should have _expected—_but even when Isabela's tanned arm appears, pushing out the girl in a wild flutter of linen curtains and bewildered horror, Fenris can find no peace. He knows what Hawke's back looks like.

After all, he left the scars there himself.

Fenris lurches from the chair in an ungainly, awkward movement that nearly topples the mannequin beside him. Fool, fool, _fool—_how could he not have realized what the girl would see; how could he not have stopped her following after them? He has become too complacent, too careless, too eager to believe Hawke's easy mask to see the truth hidden beneath it. He takes one step forward—but Aveline is ahead of him, swirling out of her curtains in a sky-blue dress only half-laced up the back; her pale, freckled shoulders show only for an instant, and then she slips into Hawke's room and pulls the curtain closed behind her. She asks a question, her voice low and gentle, and Hawke answers with a pained laugh that makes something deep in his chest ache.

The girl turns to Fenris with both hands over her mouth. "I'm so—I'm so _sorry_," she says, blinking back startled, embarrassed tears. "I didn't mean—it was an accident! I was just—surprised, that's all. _Please _tell the Champion I'm sorry. I would never have—_never—_"

She falls silent at the look on his face, her breath hitching. With as little control as he has at the moment Fenris is not surprised at her hesitation, but rather than frighten her further, he turns on his heel and stalks from the suite, leaving the flock of open-mouthed shopgirls and their tiny gold-striped chairs behind them. "Tell Hawke I will come back," he mutters to an elf with an enormous purple dress cradled in her arms; the girl bobs a nervous nod, and Fenris feels their stares burn into the back of his head all the way across the shop until at last he turns the carved rosette handle of the front door and escapes.

-.-

He doesn't go far. His driving need is not for flight but for _air, _for clean sunlight and wind and the less-oppressive company of people who neither know him nor care to. He is not inconspicuous—that is not a luxury his appearance affords—but he _is_ ignored as he passes out of the shadows, and that is enough. It takes only three paces to reach the rail that overlooks the rest of the Hightown market; Jean-Luc's shop proper occupies most of the sunlit second level, exclusive and expensive and at the moment, choked with memory. Fenris stares down at the bustling hum below him, at the nobles and servants alike mingling at the open-air stalls with no more concern than saving a handful of coppers, and tries to push away the sharp-cracking echo of a whip in the back of his head.

"—_appalling, _really. Dragging the Champion off like that, like some sort of war-prize—it's savage!"

It takes him only a moment to find the voice's owner: a thin, older woman in a fur-lined stole standing almost directly below him, her head bent in coquettish secrecy towards another middle-aged woman in a pink dress. A younger, pale girl, about seventeen, stands beside them. "Oh, I _know,_" says the other woman, flapping a hand. "I could hardly believe it when Lady Lukis told me! My sister always told me those foreign mages were barbarians—and she was right! It's beyond me why the city didn't send out some sort of—oh, search party or something. Atrocious, if you ask me."

"If you ask _me,_" says the first woman with the fur, her voice dropping even lower, "I'm not so very sure the captivity was quite so—_unwilling._"

The girl scoffs, obviously disgusted with a theory she has heard before, but Fenris's hands tighten on the railing above them. The woman in the pink dress leans closer. "Do go on."

"_Well_, that foreigner—he was a mage, wasn't he? And you know she's one of _them _too for all the templars try to hush it up. They say Tevinter's a grand place for those people, a place they don't have to hide. And besides, _you _were there in the Keep just like I was; _you _saw her fight that horrible qunari beast. Don't you think she could have beaten a man if she _really _wanted to? A mock fight, a few scratches for show—and then she's off to a magic city without a care in the world to lord it over the normal folk."

"I suppose…but that seems—forgive me—a touch extreme. What about the elf?"

"What elf? Oh, oh—the lover? The slave?"

Fenris clenches his jaw so hard it creaks. It is beyond ludicrous to continue standing here, to continue listening to such mindless and spiteful drivel—and yet, he cannot seem to make himself move. Below him, the girl crosses her arms with a huff.

"The _ex-_slave, Mother. Perrin told me the mage was his old master, and the Champion went to Minrathous to help kill him."

"All that for an _elf_?" says the woman in fur, the way she might have said _stray dog _or _table._ "Don't be ridiculous, dear."

The girl, clearly stung, jerks her head away in a cloud of blonde braids and ribbons. "_I _think it's romantic."

"It's _preposterous, _and I don't want to hear another word about it. The Champion has better things to do than go around cavorting with dirty, foreign elves."

"Mother!"

"Lady's grace, girl, lower your voice! Show a little decorum—you're certainly old enough to know better. Come on, we still have two stops before lunch. _So _nice to see you, Iris; _do _stop by for dinner tonight. Bring Dudley along. It's been so long since we've seen you two…"

The two older women sweep off in a cloud of expensive perfume that catches on a slight updraft to carry to Fenris's nose. He hardly notices, though; he is lost in a sudden mire of unthinking fury, thick with guilt and dark with anger not for his own sake—he became inured to those insults long ago—but for Hawke. How _dare _they trivialize Hawke's pain; how dare they mock her suffering? The metal of his gauntlets digs further into the stone under his hands as he tries to stop himself from thundering down the stairs after those—those—

"Idiots!" comes a hiss, very angry and very quiet, and Fenris looks down to see the girl still standing ramrod straight below him, her hands fisted as tight as his own. "Stubborn, cockeyed old—old biddies!"

His anger seeps out of him like a cracked well. The girl is right, after all: they are nothing more than a pair of gossipy noblewomen, noisy as a pair of honking geese and just as significant. Hawke would have laughed to hear their assessment of her, not lost herself in rage. Fenris cannot laugh at this, not like she would have, but he can give their words their due consequence—none at all.

He pushes away from the wall, accidentally dislodging a bit of crumbled mortar with the tip of his forefinger. It falls straight and true as if he'd launched it on purpose, landing square atop the girl's head like a direct summons; she lifts one hand and her eyes follow, and before Fenris can even think of backing away from the rail her gaze fixes squarely on his, first in surprise, and then in slow and dawning recognition.

Her mouth falls open as she looks at him, then after the chattering figures of the two women, and then back at him in helpless embarrassment. He sees her mouth _I'm sorry_, and despite it being the second apology he has received in as many minutes, Fenris can still find no appropriate answer to give. In the end he settles for an unsmiling nod; the girl blushes furiously and dips a curtsey, and then sets off after her mother in a walk slightly too hurried to be called sedate. Fenris watches her go only for a moment and then, forcibly dismissing the conversation from his mind, he turns back towards the boutique. In truth, he has little desire to brave the frightened attendants and their army of overpriced dresses again. Even the thought of Hawke in a red gown is not tempting enough at the moment, and when the window display of the tiny shop next to Jean-Luc's catches his eye, he lets himself be distracted by the sight.

It is a sweets shop, he realizes, the window full of artfully-displayed chocolates and gourmet candies scattered across red velvet like gems. Fenris himself has little enough of a sweet tooth, but even a box of stickied plums is preferable to one more shamefaced apology, and before he can talk himself out of it, Fenris enters the shop and tries not to feel like a man walking to his doom.

"Morning, serah," calls the proprietor from behind the counter, a heavyset, bearded man in a spotless white apron. "Looking for anything in particular?"

"No," says Fenris, flexing his fingers at his side in discomfort. The shop is empty save him, the very air sugared enough to make his teeth ache.

The man shrugs and goes back to arranging a pristine pyramid of truffles on a crystal platter. "Suit yourself. Let me know if you see anything you like."

Fenris says nothing and without real purpose, begins wandering through the narrow aisles. Every table he passes is crammed chest-high with sweets; one is covered in brightly colored hard candy, another with every conceivable fruit surrounding a basin of melted chocolate. He finds himself holding his breath as he passes an impossible, delicate spire made of spun sugar, the fire-hardened candy drawn thin like wire and shaped like glass into a perfect, intricate replica of the Chantry belltower. Then, on the stand just past it, he finds a display of molded chocolates that so surprises him that he stops dead in his tracks.

"Like those, do you?" The shopkeeper laughs, placing another truffle atop his pyramid. "I call them Templar Treats."

Fenris picks up one of the pieces by its foil wrapping, careful not to touch the chocolate itself. "Are these…?"

"Knight-Commander Meredith's face? Why, yes, they are. Hand-painted, each piece."

Fenris replaces the piece of painted chocolate among its sisters, feeling absurdly nervous at the sight of sixty tiny Merediths staring accusingly up at him. "And does the Knight-Commander…care for this sort of thing?"

The man shrugs. "Haven't the foggiest idea, serah. She's never come in to try one, if that's your meaning. But they sell like hotcakes, and until she sends a batch of templars to shut them down, I'll keep making them."

"Ah." Fenris edges by without making eye contact with the confections again, or with the little red-glazed templar shields surrounding them. Then, in the corner, he spies a large, earthenware bowl surrounded by almost plain canvas sacks tied off with scarlet ribbon. By the time Fenris makes it to the table, his discomfort is gone; when he sees what the bowl holds, he wants to smile for the first time in days.

The bowl is filled to the brim with salted, honeyed almonds.

He is not used to gift-giving, but two thoughts race through his head in quick succession: _Hawke would like these _and _I wish to give these to Hawke. _Shaking his head at himself, he hefts one of the white canvas bags in his hand. Two or three pounds, he guesses—too much to carry easily, considering Hawke's other packages, and certainly too large to conceal—but all the same, he does not hesitate as he carries the bag to the front counter.

"Ah, found something, did you?" says the man, already pulling out a bit of brown paper to wrap the bag. "We just got those in from Vol Dorma. Will you be taking this with you, serah, or would you like it delivered?"

Of all the things Fenris had expected to do today, buying sweets for Hawke had not exactly been in the top five. "Delivered."

The man turns and shouts into the back room; a moment later, a young boy with a smudge over his nose emerges with a quick step. "A delivery," says the man, handing the boy the wrapped package, and when Fenris finishes the directions, the boy sketches a wide-eyed bow before vanishes out the front door like a shot. "Don't mind him," the shopkeeper says, giving a good-natured sigh. "A bit of hero worship, that's all. It'll pass."

Fenris chooses to let the confusing statement go without asking for clarification—enough time has passed that he is eager to rejoin the others, and he is not interested in dwelling on the muddled mind of a chocolatier's delivery boy. "How much?"

"No charge."

Fenris blinks. "I'm sorry?"

The man smiles behind his beard, waving Fenris towards the door. "Just tell the Champion—welcome home."

"I will," Fenris says after a moment, and the smell of spun sugar follows after him as he leaves.

-.-

"What have _you _been up to? You smell good enough to lick."

"Browsing," Fenris says shortly, and pushes Isabela's face away from his neck. "Where is Hawke?"

"Just changing now," Aveline answers him from where she stands at the window, picking through a display of beaded shawls without much interest. "If you want to go back to the suite, she'll be done in a moment."

There is something in her voice—but she shrugs, and Fenris gives a slow nod before making his way to the rooms at the back of the shop. Isabela falls into step beside him and he throws her a glance, but her face is perfectly casual—and then he opens the door to the private suite and realizes the stark and bitter truth.

"An ambush," he says flatly, and hears the click of Isabela locking the door behind him.

Leaning against a mannequin draped in a man's formal suit and with Jean-Luc himself brandishing a tape measure at her side, Hawke crosses her arms and grins.

-.-

"Are you still sulking?"

"No."

Varric laughs. "You _are! _Third day in a row—this has to be some kind of record, elf."

Fenris flicks a bit of wet sand from his wrist, sliding his sword over his back and studiously avoiding Varric's eyes. "Leave it."

Hawke slings her free arm over his shoulder with a fresh spray of wet sand while Varric nudges one of the dead slavers over the edge of the cliff, sending the body toppling into the grey seas below them with a quiet splash. "Ignore him," she suggests with a grin.

"Him, or you?"

"Sourpuss."

He scoffs. "Nuisance."

"At least you'll be a sharply-dressed grump."

He dislodges her arm with a stiff shrug; she lets him at first, but as her hand withdraws she reaches up and tweaks his ear, and it is only her laughter and her quick-footed retreat up the rock-strewn path of the Wounded Coast that keep him from chasing her down. "You may expect retribution for that, mage," he promises, shifting his weight casually to one side. She knows as well as he does that his mood is mostly show, and he lets the corner of his mouth curve up in a smirk.

"Empty threats," Hawke taunts, but he sees her edge a half-step further up the path.

Fenris nearly starts up the path after her, leaving the rest of the dead slavers' pocket-pilfering to Varric, but before he can take more than a step Anders has slid between them, both arms outstretched to ward off the impending battle. "_No _roughhousing," he says to Hawke, eyes stern and unforgiving. "No hard running, no jumping, no extra strain. You've already pushed it coming out here to fight; I'd really rather not have gone all the way to Tevinter and back just to lose you to sepsis. And _you_," he adds with a glare at Fenris. "Don't encourage her."

_The world is: cold steel eyes, a tight fist in his hair, and a honey-smoothed voice curling into his ear. "Do not encourage her, dear pet. One does not praise a sword for its sharpened edge; one does not reward a slave for unexceptional service—" _

The memory is worse than cold water to the face. Fenris scowls, but Hawke cuts him off. "Anders, I'm fine—"

"You're not, and you won't be if you open up your back again." Anders pinches the bridge of his nose with a weary sigh. "I'm not confining you to bed rest, Hawke—I just want you to be careful."

Her eyes soften as she drops a hand on Anders's shoulder. "I know. I will be."

Anders looks doubtful—and rightly so, Fenris thinks—but concedes with a frown and lowers his arms.

"Fantastic," comes Varric's dry voice from behind them. "Heartwarming, really. Now, if today's touching family drama is finished, you want to help me with these slavers?"

Hawke grins, swinging her staff loosely at her side as she makes her way back down the path towards Varric and the bodies still surrounding him. "You know, I really missed going through dead people's pockets with you, Varric. Every day, between the magisters and the mind-numbing busywork, I kept finding myself thinking, 'oh, if only I had a bit of frayed rope and a couple of broken longswords, then this place would _really_ feel like home.'"

"I'm touched, Hawke," Varric says, and shoves another body into the sea.

They make short work of the remaining slavers, even with Hawke's inability to focus and Anders's covert fretting, and soon enough the four of them are on their way back to Kirkwall, marginally richer and a good deal dirtier than they'd left it. The skies are clear, the weather cooling with an early fall, and even the biting, salt-thick smell of the ocean is almost restrained as if in welcome—but Fenris notices little of it. His thoughts are miles away, lost in the white marble halls of a magister's mansion, and it is not until he walks squarely into Hawke's back that he realizes she has stopped.

"Are you all right?" she asks without preamble, and Fenris blinks the coast back into existence. Ahead of them on the path, Varric and Anders are deep in some kind of discussion about structuring manifestos, far enough away that their voices will not carry with the wind.

"I am fine," he says, realizing belatedly it is a mirror of her own answer and equally as truthful. "I was thinking of—broken longswords."

Her mouth twists in a wry grin. She has told the others little of what happened in Minrathous, Fenris knows, only enough to assuage their concerns and fill in the longest stretches of their absence. They know that her memory suffered; they do not know the scars on her back are of his making. "Masochist."

"Not without cause," Fenris says, and lifts his hand to touch the high, black collar of her coat.

"You know you're the only one who blames you for that."

"Because I am the only one who knows? I am overjoyed."

"Sarcasm doesn't do you any favors, Fenris."

"Neither does ignorance," he retorts, but his thumb slides along the line of her cheek to temper his tone.

Hawke shakes her head, letting the argument die before it starts. "Change of topic. You have any plans for this evening?"

"Besides your ludicrous party?"

"Besides my ludicrous party."

"I do not."

"Good," she says, and hooks a finger under the wrist-strap of his gauntlet. "Come home with me after."

Fenris raises an eyebrow, ignoring for the moment the sudden lazy curl of heat in the pit of his stomach. He wants to ask _are you certain_, and he wants to ask _are you well enough_, but he knows Hawke would not welcome either those questions or the sentiment behind them, so instead he closes his hand around hers and says only, "I am yours."

"Good," Hawke says again, a warm and half-hidden promise in her eyes, and when Varric calls after them, the smile she gives him lingers in his thoughts all the way back to Kirkwall.


	2. part two

**After Rain**  
><em>part two<em>

-.-

He is wearing boots.

Hawke points at his feet. "You're wearing boots."

"So it would seem," Fenris says, curling his toes inside the soft black leather. They are warm and do not pinch—Hawke had been quite adamant about that at the tailor's—and he cannot articulate how eager he is to be done with them all the same.

Hawke sees the flat look on his face and grins. "You still don't like them, do you?"

"They are not—intolerable," he hedges—they had been a gift, after all—but Hawke rolls her eyes and leans up to kiss his cheek.

"Don't worry about it," she says, resting her hands on his close-cut black coat and thumbing the collar of the starched white shirt he wears underneath it. "Get through this hour, and I promise I'll never force you into those foot-prisons again."

"That is a costly vow to make, Hawke," Fenris says, lips twitching as Orana helps Hawke into her cloak.

She sticks a red silk glove between her teeth while she tugs the other one into place. "I'll take that risk," she says around the glove, wincing as Orana tucks a loose strand of dark hair back into place with a gold pin. "All right," she adds as she pulls the other glove on and spreads her hands wide, "presentable?"

Fenris crosses his arms, making a show of studied inspection. Hawke had gone with Isabela's serendipitous choice from the shop after all—the gown is simply cut, the full skirt gathered at one hip and a red so deep as to be black. The back is high and intricately embroidered, the neck wide but modest. The darkness of the fabric makes a sharp contrast with the paleness of her throat, its severity offset only by the beaten gold band around her neck, as wide as his palm and glinting with cool beads of light. He knows she wears it in both defiance and disguise; he knows too that not all her scars can be so easily hidden.

He also knows that he cannot remember Hawke ever looking as lovely as she does tonight. "Yes," he says, and when he offers her his hand, she takes it.

The gala is less than a five-minute walk away, far too close to hire a curricle, and Orana waves them both a cheerful farewell from the doorway as they turn into the cool breezes of the evening. Kirkwall is peaceful tonight, the streets quiet save the distant calls of the guard at the changing of the watch. He is not even troubled by the lack of his sword—he and Hawke are weapons enough in themselves, enough to deter the more reckless thieves that haunt Hightown at night even in their trumped-up finery, and when Hawke tucks her gloved hand into the crook of his elbow, Fenris feels the closest he has come to peace in weeks.

"So," Hawke says without preamble, "here's the plan. We go in, we eat, we mingle—well, I mingle, I guess—and then as soon as it's polite I become overwhelmed with fatigue. Then you glare at anyone who protests, I make my goodbyes, and we get out of there like the Black Divine himself is after us."

"Succinct. And effective."

"No objections?"

"The sooner I am free of these boots, the better." Hawke laughs, her hand tightening on his arm, and Fenris permits himself a smile. Regardless of her machinations, he has no illusions that this evening will be anything but a torment. "Do you know the family well?"

"The de Faurés? Not really. Mother knew Girard before she ran away with my father, and we had dinner with them a few times before—well, before." Her voice catches only a moment before she presses on determinedly. "Anyway, Girard is nice enough if a bit oblivious. His wife is friendly but an incorrigible gossip—she said the worst things about Mother when we first moved into the estate but of _course _didn't believe a _word _of it, _so _sorry to hear about _Malcolm_. There's a daughter, too, named—oh, something. I can't remember. Redeemable, but squashed under her mother's thumb like a grape."

Fenris snorts. "How vivid."

"They're vivid people, I guess." She hesitates a moment, then says, "Fenris…"

"I know, Hawke." He does, too. Fenris's earliest memories are of blue-blooded magisters and all their attendant prejudices; he is more than familiar with the biting, backhanded compliments bestowed by those both in power and lusting after it. It had been bad enough as a slave in Minrathous—being a _favored_ slave had been immeasurably worse. He had once been praised for his service at fetes far grander than this; he has stood with equanimity before the Archon himself. The thought of these mincing, prancing nobles looking down their noses at him in comparison, even as rich as they are, is laughable. He is free; he is with Hawke; Hawke loves him.

That is so much more than enough.

They make the last turn into the eastern square that houses a number of Kirkwall's elite. There are several expensive-looking lanterns strung around the courtyard of the de Fauré estate in a welcome as restrained as it is opulent, and beside him Hawke gives a quiet, despairing sigh. "I shall weather the storm," she mutters, one hand coming up to touch the gold pins in her hair nervously. "I shall endure. Damn it."

"Are you ready?"

"No. Let's go."

"Onward, Champion," Fenris says, and for an instant, in the pale and shining light of the de Faurés' lanterns, the thick gold collar around Hawke's neck flickers like fire.

-.-

The room erupts when they enter, the great hall filling to the rafters with warm and half-sincere greetings for the Champion, returned at long last to their glittering society like a particularly exotic pet. Fenris keeps close to her side out of both habit and conscious intent—he has been too long a mage's bodyguard to quash his instinctive wariness of large crowds, but more than that is the simple truth that even if she does not need it here, in this perfumed and silken gallery, he _wants _to protect her.

He thinks, somehow, he has earned that choice.

Eventually, the hosts break through the throng of bejeweled well-wishers. He sees Girard first, a genial, absentminded-looking man with silver hair and a beard; the wife comes next, familiar and somehow unwelcome, and it is not until her pale, blonde daughter in purple satin approaches at her elbow that Fenris places her at last as the woman from the Hightown market with the fur stole and cutting tongue.

"Oh," says the girl, startled, and covers her mouth when Girard glances at her.

"Welcome, Champion," says the mother, her eyes crinkling with humor as she clasps both Hawke's hands in hers. "I am _so _pleased you could come, dear girl. Girard and I have _so _been looking forward to seeing you again—we missed you, you know, when you went away like that without a _word _of warning—but anyway, here you are! _Do _make yourself comfortable, child—you remember my daughter, Jule?"

"Of course," Hawke says warmly, extending her hand to Jule, who takes it with furiously flushing cheeks. "How've you been?"

Her eyes dart to Fenris before she answers. "I've been—well. Thank you."

"I'm glad. And Girard, Léonie—this is Fenris," Hawke adds, placing one hand on Fenris's arm just above the band of scarlet ribbon. "I don't believe you've met."

Her mother's gaze flicks sharply to her husband, but to his credit Girard seems perfectly at ease with a foreign elf in his home. "Welcome, welcome," he says. "Any friend of Leandra's girl is a friend of mine."

"How do you do," says Jule, and her blush deepens. Fenris inclines his head without a smile, neither acknowledging nor disavowing their brief meeting, and her eyes drop to the floor.

Girard doesn't seem to notice his daughter's discomfort as he waves vaguely at the lavish hall behind him. "Well, come in, see the place in all its finery. There's food around here somewhere, and brandy—or wine, if that's more your taste? There were trays all over the place just a moment ago. Just wave someone down if you get peckish—bloody hired help, never around when you want them."

"Thank you," Fenris says gravely, and after a few more moments of empty chitchat, he and Hawke both move to the next circle of eager admirers. It doesn't take long before he loses patience with the de Faurés' honored and idiotic guests; the third time a soft-headed noble asks about Hawke's conquests among Tevinter's magisters, unsubtle in both his insinuations and implicit questions, Fenris gives up altogether and abandons the burden of conversation to Hawke. The long train of gentry becomes little more than a whirl of bright silks and satins, studded here and there with gold and diamonds and glass-caught light; servants with silver trays pass by in the dark grey livery of de Fauré, shadows to their glimmering counterparts and just as ignored. Even the decorations are expensive, hand-painted screens and candelabra scattered all over the room with polished mirrors set behind them to reflect the light, filling the room to the ceiling with a warm golden glow that both softens the hard-edged smiles and deepens them.

His name catches his ear over the music of the string quintet half-hidden in one corner, and, and Fenris turns back to Hawke's current conversation just in time to hear one of the women begin cooing over a painfully romanticized account of their escape from Minrathous. Her companion, a tall, dark man with black hair and a silver doublet, bends closer to Hawke than strictly proper. "Truly, your suffering has been unimaginable," he says, his voice deep and his eyes almost uncomfortably earnest. "No jewel like you should have been profaned by such a foreigner."

Hawke laughs. "_Profaned _is such a strong word. It really was closer to 'ordered around for a while and then he died.' You make it sound so—I don't know. Sordid."

One of the women sighs in unhidden longing, the feathers in her hair bobbing with the movement. "How _awful_," she says with relish. "Carried away on a magister's ship in chains, forced to serve in his household until you can make your daring escape—it's like a novel!"

Fenris makes a private note to curtail Varric's literary production until further notice. "Really," Hawke says, raising her hands in placation, "you're making it sound much more exciting than it really was."

"Did you wear servant's clothing?" one girl asks, her eyes wide, and then another asks, "Where did you sleep?" and Fenris feels the sudden urge to throttle the lot of them.

Hawke purses her lips, clearly annoyed, but nods to the first question and answers the second, "In a small room with a barred window. Danarius was very accommodating, I suppose, in a spartan, vicious sort of way."

The dark man moves, then, catching one of Hawke's hands in his own and pressing his lips to her gloved knuckles. "If I had known, nothing could have kept me from your rescue," he says, low and passionate, and Fenris barely represses a snort.

Hawke tugs her fingers free with a smile and lets them drop to Fenris's wrist between them, hidden by the folds of dark red organza. "That's very generous, Ser Jorin," she says, "but I'm afraid you would have found Minrathous a bit—barbaric for your tastes."

"I am not frightened by the uncivilized," he says, straightening, and his eyes slide to Fenris in a manner that can be nothing less than an open challenge.

One of the women gasps, lifting a green-gloved hand to cover her mouth; another man in navy silk shifts uncomfortably at the dark man's side. For a long, considering moment, Fenris does nothing. He ought to be offended, he thinks, ought to wish nothing more than to strike the insolent smile from his handsome face—but instead he feels nothing but the sudden and ridiculous urge to _laugh. _This pompous little man-child, as terrifying as a teakettle in his silver doublet, clutching his crystal wineglass with soft white fingers—rescue _Hawke?_ He has a sudden, brilliant image of the boy galloping up to the front doors of Danarius's estate, coiffed hair impeccable as he brandishes a flimsy, button-tipped rapier and shouts for the magister to come out and duel. Fenris blinks, barely suppressing his sudden smile—and then in his head, Danarius respectfully waits for the boy to finish his speech before incinerating that silver doublet and the smile turns into a full-blown laugh that Fenris almost, _almost_ disguises as a cough.

"Excuse me," he says politely, coughing into his closed fist again as if to salvage the illusion. Beside him, Hawke stares studiously at the ceiling, deliberately ignoring Jorin's incensed, embarrassed glare as if she has suddenly been struck deaf. His friend in the navy silk looks first at him and then at Jorin, and when another laugh lodges in his throat Fenris knows the situation is hopeless. "Excuse me," he says again, dipping a half-bow at the company in general, and then he turns and heads for the elaborate sideboard on the far side of the room as quickly as possible. Behind him he hears a whispered, "I think he was _laughing _at you, Jorin," and a more viciously hissed _"Shut up!"_ and by the time he reaches the opposite wall he is grinning widely enough to elicit more than one side-eyed glance.

The sideboard, set against the marble staircase up to the second level overlooking the main floor, is laid out with a number of delicacies on polished, tiered silver platters—Fenris sees a generous selection of chocolates from the sweets shop on a dish frothing with white lace—but he forgoes them for the moment, choosing instead to liberate a wineglass from a passing servant's tray. The vintage is excellent, another mark in Girard de Fauré's favor, and Fenris leans back against the banister to watch the gaggle of clucking nobility attempt to soothe the lord Jorin's ruffled feathers. Hawke catches his gaze across the room and rolls her eyes; Fenris smirks and lifts his glass to her in a silent toast, and she cannot quite hide her answering smile as she turns to answer another question from the woman at her elbow.

The room blurs, suddenly, in a swirl of colored silks and cut-glass decanters, and for a moment—the world is lost in the memory of another luxurious hall, full of tittering, hard-eyed women draped in jewels and men in lustrous robes, and Hawke beside him as he holds a carved decanter full of dark wine, frightened and pale and dressed in white—

"Two glasses, please," comes a distracted voice beside him. Fenris pays it no mind at first; it is not until white-gloved fingers snap a summons directly in his line of sight that he realizes the order was meant for _him_. "Two _glasses_, elf," the voice says again, and Fenris slowly turns his head to meet the impatient face of a young, redheaded nobleman in a gold suit.

He doesn't know if the boy is a fool or simply preoccupied, but either way he fails to read the inherent warning in Fenris's eyes. "Champagne, two glasses," he repeats, glancing over his shoulder. "Shit—she's walking away. Damn, man, the drinks!"

Fenris stares at him a moment, then very deliberately raises his wineglass to his lips—

—only to have it snatched away at the last moment by the red-headed young man, whose impatience has apparently bled into the irate. "And _drinking_ on the job! I don't know where in flames Girard hired you from, but if I have my way I'm going to see that you'll _never _find employment in this city again_._"

The wine slops a bit over the lip of the cut-crystal glass, and Fenris wonders if Hawke would consider it rude to kill another man's guest. _Probably_, he thinks, sighing, but—perhaps breaking a few fingers would only be a bit of a faux-pas, smoothed over with an apology and a basket of fresh fruit. He'd certainly broken more than fingers in Tevinter, once, but parties thrown by avowed blood mages had always tended a bit towards the sadistic anyway, and he doubts somehow that hosts this side of Nevarra would be quite as understanding as the magisters of a bit of errant bloodshed.

"Why are you looking at me like that? I swear, if you don't go fetch—Jule!"

Fenris hadn't even noticed the de Fauré girl's approach, intent as he is on curbing his urge to break this boy's teeth. "Martin, what are you doing?" she asks breathlessly, arriving in a cloud of purple satin and palpable anxiety. "I'm so sorry, ser," she adds to a still-silent Fenris with a curtsey, "was he bothering you?"

"Jule, what on earth—why are you—"

"_Martin_, serah," she says to Fenris, her voice as stiff as iron, "is the son of my mother's friend, Iris Fournier. Martin, please allow me to present the companion of the Champion of Kirkwall, Fenris."

"Good evening," Fenris says, and watches in fascination as the blood drains from the boy's face.

"I—ah. That is—please do forgive me, ser, I didn't—ah, realize." He looks left, then down, then realizes he is still holding Fenris's wineglass. "This is, um, yours, I suppose—" he stammers, proffering the gleaming crystal in a suddenly-shaking hand; Fenris plucks it delicately from his fingers and wipes the spilled wine from the rim with his thumb.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, ser," the boy says, voice trembling, and then without another word, he spins on his heel and flees.

Jule watches him go, then looks up at Fenris with unhidden nervousness and says, "_Do _forgive him, please. Martin's a bit of an idiot, but he really doesn't mean any harm." Fenris says nothing, and after an awkward glance at her feet she continues. "And—as long as I'm apologizing for people, please let me do so for my mother, too, and Lady Iris. I know you heard them—us—that day, and—"

"They do not mean any harm," Fenris finishes for her, and she nods miserably. Across the room, Hawke is deep in conversation with two women in blue, though a few of her suitors still hover close at her elbow, throwing dark looks in Fenris's direction every time Hawke turns away. "Keep your apologies," he says at last without looking at the blonde girl beside him. "You did not offend me."

She lets out a short, relieved sigh, and leans against the wall beside him. "All right."

She offers neither further excuses nor conversation for several minutes, and Fenris contents himself with the silence and his wine as Hawke slowly winds her way towards him through the guests, the dark-haired Jorin trailing after her like a dog on a leash. It is not that Hawke encourages him—Fenris can see even from here how indifferently she responds to his compliments—but more that he has apparently decided to have her attention whether she wills it or not, and Fenris suspects that nothing short of an outright rejection will deter him from his stubborn course. He briefly entertains the thought of intervening but dismisses it almost as quickly—Hawke is more than capable of handling a besotted fop on her own, and in the end her methods would probably be less damaging to her reputation than his.

Then, without preamble, Jule says, "I think it must have been horrible."

His glass pauses halfway to his mouth. "What?"

She is blushing again, he notices, but her jaw is determined. "Minrathous. The magister. Everyone's making it out to be this wonderful story, but I don't think it was like that at all. Even Mother says it couldn't have possibly been as bad as the rumors make it out to be, but I think—that she's wrong."

Fenris is silent. Hawke is nearer now, close enough that he can hear the tinge of exasperation underlying her voice. A dark-headed girl beside her asks her about Danarius's magnificent manor, and Fenris can almost see Hawke counting to ten in her head before answering the girl with a smile. The candlelight catches in her black hair like sparks, makes her gown flare scarlet when she breathes—and when she speaks, the wide gold links of her collar blaze bright enough to burn.

"No," Fenris says at last. "It was worse."

"Oh," Jule says softly, and then she says nothing.

With one more swallow, Fenris finishes his wine and replaces the empty glass on the sideboard. Hawke glances at him and gives a short, fervent nod, as eager to be away as he; Fenris straightens and pushes away from the wall, but before he can take even one step, Jorin and his silver doublet have apparently had enough of Hawke's persistent disinterest, and as she passes he clasps her by the wrist hard enough to stop her in her tracks.

"Let go, please," Fenris hears her say, a thin thread of steel creeping into her tone, but Jorin only pulls her closer to his chest.

"Just tell me," he says, his voice low and persuasive and far too warm to be appropriate. "You've been making a joke of it all night, saying you killed that magister, but _I _know you wouldn't have murdered a man in cold blood. It's not _decent_, darling, and certainly not for a woman like you—just tell me how he died, won't you? And then we can drop this charade."

Hawke stares openmouthed at Jorin for a second that stretches like out like drawn wire, and then her gaze flicks to an equally-astonished Fenris over his shoulder and something sharp snaps into place. She drops her eyes and bites her lip in a sudden shyness that surprises them both, and when Jorin leans closer she turns her head away with demure timidity. "All right," Fenris hears her say, and he thinks he is the only person in the room who realizes how close Jorin is to disaster. "I'll tell you the truth, but—" she looks up, catching the man's collar in both hands in open desperation, "you have to promise not to think less of me."

"All right, darling—"

"Promise!"

"I promise!"

She tugs at his shoulder, bringing his ear down to her level, and Fenris watches as the look on his face changes from deep satisfaction to blank surprise as she speaks. Her whispers continue too quietly for Fenris to hear, but suddenly his face changes again to shock and a wild-eyed horror that is almost comical in its severity, and before Hawke can even finish Jorin shoves her away with a curse.

"Get away from me," he gasps, loud enough that several guests turn to stare. Somewhere in the background, the music limps into silence. "Get back—don't _touch _me, bitch—"

There's a sharp inhale from the watching nobles and Jule lets out a wordless, aghast noise of protest beside him, but Fenris only crosses his arms and waits. Hawke meets Jorin's gaze with an opaque, level look of her own, and it is the closest Fenris has seen to her real self since this blasted party began. "Goodness, Ser Jorin," she murmurs, "are you quite all right?"

"You—you—"

"Me, me," she echoes, not quite mocking but with no trace of her earlier gentleness. "So much for your promises."

"If that—if you—if that's the truth, then you're a—you're a monster."

Hawke smiles, a hard, edged thing, and one hand comes up to touch the base of her throat. "The truth is not always _decent_, darling," she says and Jorin blanches, jerking away from her hand in disgust. She watches him for a moment, quiet and composed as he stumbles back into the stunned crowd, and then Hawke turns to Fenris and for an instant the light streaks over her face like a flame, turning her into something else, something otherworldly and glorious and dangerous like a blade. Fenris finds himself stepping towards her before he is aware he is moving, the throng opening up before him like the silent, worn pages of a prayer-book; when he reaches her she lifts her head so that the gold pins turn to flecks of fire in her hair, and she says, softly, "I'm done, Fenris."

"I know," he says, and in this moment he would have given the lyrium from his skin if it would have eased the strain in her face.

"Wait, I'll—" they both turn at the voice to see Jule hurrying towards them through the hushed crowd, her cheeks flushed but her eyes calm and steady. "If you really must go, please allow me to see you out."

"Of course," says Hawke, dipping into a measure of her half-abandoned graciousness. "Please pardon our interruption."

Jule shakes her head and links her purple-sleeved arm with Hawke's. "Not at all," she says, looking older than her years, and as the three of them make their way to the foyer the music picks up again and the crowd behind them resumes its noise, filling in the gaps in their wake like a river thawing in the spring. "I am so sorry," Jule adds in an undertone. "I didn't realize he was going to be so persistent or so—_blatant_. Mother thought it was sweet and she didn't believe me when I said you were—"

She clamps her lips shut, blushing even brighter, and Hawke laughs. "Taken?"

Fenris sighs. He is so _tired _of these nobles, tired of the glistening jewels, tired of the insincere smiles and the expensive music and his boots cut too well to pinch. He wants to go _home, _with Hawke, and close out the world's insistent clamor until they both feel whole enough again to withstand it, and when the wooden-faced footman opens the front door to let in the cool, curling breeze of the evening it feels like the first real breath he has taken in over an hour.

A servant helps Hawke into her cloak and she turns and smiles at Jule. "Thank you for a…well, a memorable evening."

"My pleasure," she says, equally as wry; then her smile turns to something more nervous and she adds, "Please, if you like—may I visit you sometime? If it's not too much trouble."

"I would be honored," Hawke says gently, and then at last, at _last _they turn away, leaving behind the chattering gossip and the warm golden glow of the de Fauré manor as they vanish into the still and soundless night.

-.-

It begins to rain halfway back to Hawke's estate, a slow and steady drizzle that seeps down his neck and beads like glass on Hawke's cloak. They neither hurry nor slow for shelter, walking instead at the same easy pace; Hawke lifts her hood over her hair in the only concession either of them makes to the weather, and by the time they reach her front door Fenris's boots are soaked through, water pooling between his toes like the final, tired joke of the evening.

Orana and Bodahn are not there to greet them, Hawke having given them the rest of the evening off, and Hawke tugs her sodden cloak off without ceremony, tossing it over a wicker bench in the foyer as Fenris finally toes off his thrice-cursed boots. They leave them there in a damp pile along with her embroidered slippers and Fenris's black coat, and the quiet dripping of rainwater on stone is the only sound in the house as they make their way up the stairs. When she tucks her hand into the crook of his elbow, he can feel her fingers trembling.

The sound of her bedroom door clicking shut behind them is like a thunderclap in the silence. Hawke pulls away from him to scrub both hands over her face. "_Well_," she says to no one in particular, "that was fun. I can't remember the last time I burned so many bridges."

Fenris kneels to stoke the banked fire into life again, then sits back on his heels. "It could have gone more poorly."

"Oh?" She yanks off her gloves and flings them at the bed. "Do tell."

He says the first thing that comes to mind. "Danarius could have attended." Hawke stares at him over one shoulder in disbelief and he shrugs, rolling up his white shirtsleeves to his elbows. "Or the roof could have collapsed, or the cook might have discovered a nest of dragonlings in the back kitchens, or—"

"All right_, _all right!" Hawke says, laughing as if she is surprised to be, and then she bends at the waist and cups his face in both hands. "You are wonderful," she murmurs, dropping a swift kiss on his lips. "Thank you for going with me."

She starts to pull away but Fenris stops her, sliding one hand into the knot of hair at her neck to tug her back down to his mouth. He has been without her too long, watched her pull her porcelain mask over her suffering and said nothing, seen her endure the indulgent flirting of pampered, perfumed courtiers all evening and he _knows_ he is a selfish man but right now, here, in her room, he wants nothing more than her skin under his hands and her mouth on his own. Hawke sighs into his mouth and relaxes against him, her hands shifting to rest on his shoulders, and when he pushes to his feet she moves with him, angling her head into his hand until they both have to break away to breathe.

Hawke rests her forehead on his, her eyes still closed, and strokes one thumb up the side of his neck. "Fenris…"

"Hmm?"

"I'm glad there weren't any dragonlings at the party."

He lets out a breath of a laugh and she grins before she pushes back and opens her eyes. "You are easily pleased, Hawke."

"Low standards mean you're never disappointed," she retorts, and this time he lets her go as she steps away towards the full-length mirror between the crackling fire and her desk. Fenris follows her over as her hands go to her hair, pulling out one of the long golden pins and dropping it to the desk beside her; the next time she reaches Fenris catches her pale fingers in his tanned ones and as he draws out the next gold pin himself, she drops her hands to tug at her necklace instead. Her black hair pours through his hands like water, snagging on his calluses as it falls free and heavy from Orana's careful knot, and it is not until he has pulled the last pin free that he realizes Hawke has fallen still. Her eyes are half-lidded in contentment as she watches his face in the mirror; when he draws his fingers through her hair from root to tip in a long motion she shudders, and he cannot repress his smile.

"Shut up," she grumbles, resuming her efforts to remove her necklace; he gathers her hair over one bare shoulder helpfully, and in another moment he hears the faint click of the catch releasing and the wide gold band drops away. "Finally," she sighs, rubbing her neck, and Fenris sees for the first time since Isabela's ship the thick and shining scar that encircles her throat.

The sight alone is enough to stop his breath in his chest, but Hawke only places the necklace on the desk in a gleaming gold heap and leans back into Fenris. "Something wrong?" she asks.

"No," he says after a moment; she kisses the underside of his jaw where rainwater has dripped from his still-damp hair, one hand reaching for his hip behind her, and Fenris abandons his hesitation to reach for the tiny buttons that stroke down the back of her gown. It doesn't take long between his eager fingers and the gentle curve of her spine, and soon the fastenings are free to the waist to leave two dozen delicate fabric loops laddering up the pale skin of her back. Fenris slips a hand under the fabric at her neck, his heart jumping in his chest, but as he begins to slide the dress away from her shoulders Hawke shivers in a tense, anxious motion that stops him cold.

"Wait," she says, "I—wait."

"Did I hurt you?"

She shakes her head without meeting his eyes in the mirror. "No, no—it's not that, it's…never mind. I'm being stupid."

Fenris straightens, unsure of how he has misstepped but certain it is somehow his fault. "Should I go?" he asks, his voice low and toneless, and begins to pull away.

"No!" Hawke reaches for him over her shoulder, startled, but when she grabs his wrist his thumb slides over the scar on her neck and she flinches, hard, and drops her eyes.

Fenris stills in place. A idea is rising in him like a winter tide, slow and icy and inevitable, and when Hawke still does not lift her head he raises his hand and strokes, very deliberately, along the scarred skin over her throat.

"Shit," Hawke says, and starts to cry.

"Hawke," Fenris starts, then trails off into helpless silence. He has not seen her tears since Minrathous, since the first night she remembered both him and herself; he has become so accustomed to her determined strength that he has forgotten it is little more than a close-fitting mask. She is not truly sobbing_, _not even crying very hard, but the tears are thick enough to close her throat and stop her voice, and one hand flutters helplessly in the air as if in silent explanation.

"Do they hurt?" he asks, and passes his thumb over the back of her neck again.

She shakes her head and opens her mouth, but she has to swallows twice before she can speak. ""They're so…they're so ugly." She laughs, a thick, tortured sound, and Fenris feels his gut clench. "I didn't think I'd care, honestly, Fenris. Just scars, right? We all have them. And then I saw them the first day we were back when Isabela was here and she asked about them and—and all I could think of was the way his face looked when he smiled at me. Maker, they were hideous. _I_ was—" Hawke cuts herself off, blinking up at the ceiling. "I can't even look at them."

Fenris cannot speak. Hawke is scarred and she is weeping and he has never, _never _imagined how deeply she has hidden this pain, never even considered that she could have tamped down her sorrow so far behind her mask that even he could not see it. He has been so caught up in his own unhappiness that he has left her to suffer on her own, to grieve on her own as if he is the only one who carries the impotent shame of Minrathous close to his heart. His fingers dig into her shoulder in a spasm of bitter frustration—and then the words leap from his tongue like burning coals and he says, hoarsely, "Then look at me."

Her eyes go to his in the mirror, red and confused, and before she can look away, before _he _can lose his nerve, he drops his mouth to the base of her neck and presses his lips to her throat.

Hawke jerks, surprised but not afraid, and her eyes lock to his in the mirror. Fenris keeps his mouth there, feeling her pulse thud rapid and irregular under her skin, and when her head tips back, just slightly, to give him better access, he takes it for the acquiescence it is and moves further back along the scar towards her spine. It forms a perfect ring around her neck, smooth and shiny and as wide as a copper; Fenris follows it with first his mouth and then his fingers, burning a trail of wet heat warm enough for her to feel even through the deadened skin. He opens his mouth and presses his tongue against her backbone and Hawke gasps, throwing her head back abruptly enough to knock her ear against his temple.

He laughs and she does too, though hers is breathier and choked with tears, and Fenris moves to the other side of her throat. He holds her eyes as long as he can as he draws his lips towards the hollow of her neck, but even when their reflection becomes little more than a white and black blur in the corner of his vision he can still feel the forge-hot burn of her unblinking gaze, marking his skin like a brand as her hand digs harder into his hip. His fingers move smoothly over her jaw and under her ear to pull her hair aside, and then he leans back just enough to slide her banded sleeves down over her shoulders, opening the silk panels of her dress like petals to reveal the knotted, smeared stripes that are all that are left of her once-unmarred back.

The stripes _he _gave to her.

The muscles slide under her skin as she shifts her weight, uneasy and embarrassed by his intense scrutiny, but Fenris slips an arm around her waist to hold her still and she straightens, squaring her shoulders as if bracing for his revulsion—as if he could possibly be more sickened with her skin than the method of their making. The scars spread from shoulder to hip in broad, uneven lines like the unfocused streak of a brush, thickening and twisting the skin where they cross over each other, where he had split her back to bleeding with Danarius's slender leather whip.

There is nothing he can say to this, no apology he can make that she has not already heard and accepted, so instead he simply drops his head and presses an openmouthed kiss to her back.

"Fenris," she says, her voice thin and thready and trembling, and when he looks up over her shoulder she is blushing. "I can't—I can't see you."

He smiles against her skin and twists them both until she can meet his eyes again in the mirror. His lips pass over the longest weal that lies across her shoulders and she shudders, and then he bends further to the next scar over her shoulder blade and does the same. He loses track of how long she stands there, his mouth on her skin and his fingers splayed across her spine, her breath hitching gently as his teeth brush over a knot at the base of her neck, as his fingers stroke along the lines of a long and curving scar. When it becomes too awkward to bend behind her he drops to his knees without hesitation and slides his palms to the narrow dip of her waist; she shudders again and he sees gooseflesh spread across her back, her shoulders bowing forward as she watches his reflection. One arm is folded up over her chest to hold the front of her dress in place; the other hangs loose in the folds of her wine-dark skirt, forgotten as his head moves lower, as his hair leaves a damp trail over the muscles that shift with her breath.

The last scar follows the line of her back to curl around one hip like a fisher's hook; Fenris dusts a series of short, light kisses across it, dragging out this last caress as long as he can, and when he is finished he wraps both arms around her waist and rests his forehead against her back.

"I would give," he murmurs, "anything to undo this, Hawke."

"Turns out I wouldn't," she says, her eyes steady above her tearstained cheeks, and she smiles as she turns to slide her free hand into his hair. "Because it let me love you."

His heart leaps wildly as it always does, his throat closing in sudden emotion, and he hides a helpless smile of his own in her back. As if he could have done anything else.

"Fenris," says Hawke then, and when he looks up her cheeks are tingeing pink. "There's, um. One more. If you—if you want."

"One more?"

"Scar," she says, and presses her hand over her heart.

Of course there is one more, of _course—_the first wound, the first scar, the first-struck blow like an iron hammer that cracked him clean in two with despair. Fenris pushes himself to his feet and circles Hawke without lifting his hand, letting it slip over the rippling skin of her back and neck before coming to rest at the embroidered edge of her dress. The rain drums quietly on her windows in a steady, measured rhythm broken only by the snapping pops of the fire, and when Fenris bends and kisses her the low noise she makes is almost lost in their tuneless song.

He pulls back just long enough to see her uneven smile, and then his thumb slides under the fabric covering her chest to peel it away like a shell, like dry blood, like the old and age-worn porcelain of a mask grown far too small to wear another moment. The scar glimmers in the firelight, slender and silver against the warmer glow of her skin; Fenris passes his thumb once over the imperceptible ridge as if he might press it into nothingness, and then he lowers his head and closes his lips over the disfigured skin.

Hawke's gasp is sharp and sudden and loud in the quiet room. One hand comes up to tangle hard in his hair and Fenris smiles, darting out his tongue until her scar is damp and gleaming in the flickering light, and then Hawke curls her fingers under his jaw and lifts his mouth to hers.

She is hot and trembling and her eyes blaze as she kisses him, and when Fenris wraps his arms around her back the air changes in an instant to something electric, something wilder and untempered by fear or grief. "You," Hawke says into his mouth with a breathless laugh, and then again, "_you,_" and then words fail her and she only shakes her head as if that might convey the wordless impossibility of her emotion. Her hands drop to his waist, tugging at the tails of the white starched shirt he has almost forgotten he is wearing; his own fingers go to her shoulders to push away the sleeves still lingering there, and then in a whirl of white cloth and firelight his shirt is gone and her hands are on his back with the desperation of someone drowning; he cannot stand the deprivation of her touch a moment longer, so he hooks two fingers into the silk of her gown and _pulls _and at last her dress falls away in a sigh like a stream to pool, red and dark and shining, at her feet.

The flames coil up her naked skin like a lover, burnishing the curves of her body into worked bronze, catching like silvering streams on the edges of her scars and darkening her hair into a spill of ink over her shoulder. Fenris cannot speak. His mind is as blank as a rushing wind, silent and overwhelming, and when Hawke pulls him towards her bed he moves with the hushed reverence of a penitent. She turns him as they reach it and he sits down hard on the edge of the mattress; Hawke bends to kiss him, her fingers dancing down his stomach to the laces of his rain-dampened trousers, and in another moment they have joined the rest of their clothing by the fire and he is as bare as she is.

"You've gotten quiet," Hawke murmurs into his mouth, one hand sliding into the hair at the nape of his neck.

Fenris's mouth quirks into a wry smile as he strokes his fingers up her arms, gently, as if a touch too hard might shatter her into a thousand pieces. He knows her fragility is real, tender and hurting under the glass-thin veneer she has so carefully placed over it; he knows too that under even that there is a root of relentless strength as indomitable as a sky-calling bird in the winging rush of flight, a fierce and oak-hearted courage that no magister in this world could ever hope to tame. "You are beautiful," he says, and loves her.

Hawke smiles like a flash of sunlight, and when Fenris moves back on the bed she follows, pressing his shoulders down into the pillows as she slides one leg over his waist. She kisses him and her hair falls around their faces like a curtain, shutting out the rest of the world and the cruelty in it until there is nothing alive, nothing that matters but the two of them here, together, in the rain-broken silence of Hawke's room. Fenris drags his palms up the rippling ridges of Hawke's back in a long, aching motion, memorizing every knot and pit like a map to guide him home again; Hawke leans further into him until her breasts press against his chest and grins when his breathing falters, then straightens until she is sitting astride his hips with her hands resting on his chest.

"I wasn't the only one," she says, and Fenris lets his fingers fall to her hips.

"The only one?"

"That he tortured."

Fenris closes his eyes to block out the sudden memory of a plush crimson carpet and the blue-white reflection of his tattoos on the ceiling, of his skin alight with phantom pain and overt malice—and then Hawke's weight shifts on his waist and he opens his eyes to see her bending over him to splay her fingers over the knot of lyrium in the center of his chest.

"I heard you screaming," she says quietly, her eyes on her hands as they trace the raised lines of the tattoos over his chest and shoulders. "I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what I should do, if I should run or stay or try to help you and it went on for so _long_. And then you came out looking like death itself, and when you collapsed in that cot I thought for sure you'd never wake up again."

"Hawke—" he says, his fingers tightening on her waist, but she shakes her head.

"You slept for a long time," she says, "and I decided that if you ever woke up, I would do whatever I could to take away that pain. Even the memory of the pain," she adds, stroking his cheek, and then Hawke kindles a drop of magic in the lyrium over his heart and Fenris stops breathing.

It feels like fire—it feels like silk, as if he has stepped into the undying flames of Andraste's pyre only to find them smoothed and gentled, warm but unburning as they glide through the lyrium twining over his skin for what feels like an age and longer. He is distantly aware that he is glowing, his tattoos flaring white and pulsing with his swift-thudding heart, that his breath is loud and ragged and hanging in the air between them; he is aware too of Hawke's hands skimming over his chest and his stomach, following the lines of lyrium down to his navel and up again to the slender white bars over his throat, carefully and deliberately stripping him of the last of his coherency.

Hawke's weight shifts again and he realizes his hands are no longer on her waist but clenched into the pillow above his head as if that might grant him a vestige of control; instead it only bares to her new tattoos to trace, new lines to follow with her magic that sears and soothes at once, driving out every last memory of Danarius's touch until all that is left is her own. His back arches of its own accord to stretch closer to her burning fingers and she flattens her palms against his ribs, pushing him back down onto the bed as he gasps desperately for air through the flames flooding in his skin.

His name, his memory—he loses everything in her hands, in the fierce joy of her magic, until at last her teeth close gently around the tip of his ear to still his writhing, until her sparked touch eases and he realizes he is cursing in a long, broken stream of Tevinter obscenities.

"_Futuo_," he finishes blindly, half-maddened with desire, and then Hawke swallows his voice in an openmouthed kiss that nearly takes the last of his mind with it. Her hands slide into his hair and tangle there to hold him in place beneath her; his own move in haphazard circles over her breasts, her shoulders, her back, telling her with his fingers what his words cannot say as she raises herself to her knees and pauses there, as if taking one last breath before a storm. Fenris digs his heels into the rumpled covers, chest heaving, trying desperately to hold onto what gentleness she has left him, and then Hawke exhales and smiles and sinks slowly between his legs and Fenris cannot bite back his tortured groan.

They hang there a long moment, his stomach clenching with the effort to be still, and then Hawke pushes hard on his chest to lift herself and Fenris groans again. She moves at her own rhythm and her own pace, not teasing but not hurrying—it is not her control over Fenris that she tests, he knows, but her control over _herself, _resettling in her mind the careful boundaries of pleasure and pain once stripped and blurred by a magister in a marble mansion, and he is more than willing to cede that control to her for as long as she needs it.

Hawke leans forward to rest her elbows on Fenris's chest, easing her weight to her forearms as she kisses him. Her hips still move with that slow and unhinging restraint; he meets her with shallow, helpless movements of his own, knowing he is close and growing closer with every breath, every slide of her hips against his own. His hands go to her arms, feeling the race of her pulse in the pale skin of her wrist, and when her fingers smooth over his cheek with unbearable tenderness it is nearly enough to throw him over the edge. He reins himself back with ragged resolve, determined to hold himself in check until he can give her what she needs, until _she _can find the strength to draw away the last lingering edges of her fragile mask and bare the woman beneath.

Suddenly her pace quickens, her eyes clenching shut in wild fervor as she relinquishes her control; her hips drive down hard onto his and he grasps them with both hands, pushing himself deeper into her in equal abandon. He says her name and it comes out like a prayer, and as if that were the last impetus she needed, she lets out a tense, savage cry that fills the room like a song and clamps around him, digging her forehead into his neck and clenching her fists in his hair.

The sound of her voice alone is enough for Fenris; he is already _so_ close, and with another hard buck of his hips he is gone himself, his arms tightening around her back to the point of pain, lost in the unbridled rush of sensation that is Hawke.

He doesn't know how long it takes to come back to himself, to push away the warm and cocooning haze to find his legs drawn up behind Hawke, to find Hawke herself slumped over his chest, boneless and pliant as she draws her fingers down his sweating neck and shoulder and up again. Fenris loosens his arms around her, his muscles aching with the sudden release of tension, and spreads one hand over her scarred shoulder in quiet reassurance—for both her and himself.

"The rain's stopping," Hawke murmurs, and Fenris realizes it has indeed slowed, easing into something less drumming under the gentle snap of flames in the hearth. He lies there without moving for several minutes, feeling her chest rise and fall against his as she breathes, and then Hawke nestles her head further under his chin and says, "Will you stay?"

"Yes," he says, and he feels her smile, and when he lets himself drift off at last to sleep, it is with her hand resting on his heart.

-.-

Something is crunching in his ear.

Fenris rolls over, trying to get away from the noise—Hawke's bed is infinitely more comfortable than his fur-laden floor and he could easily sleep for another hour—but it follows him like an irritating tune, persistent and nagging, and even when he drags a pillow over his head it is not enough to drown out the sound of that damnable _crunching_. Fenris gives up after another moment and returns to his back, pulling the pillow just far enough down his face to glare bleary-eyed at Hawke—

—to find her sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him in her robe, her hand in a white canvas bag full to the brim with honeyed almonds.

"Hi," Hawke says, and pops another almond into her mouth.

"Good morning," Fenris says, and covers his face with the pillow again.

"I assumed these were for me. Or for us. Or is there someone else you're keeping red-ribboned surprises for under my bed?"

"No."

"No, they're not for me, or no, you don't have a tumultuous love affair hidden behind my back?"

He shoves the pillow behind his head again and scrubs the heel of his hand over his eyes. "And with whom would I have this—tumultuous affair?"

"Oh, Maker knows. Isabela. Anders. That templar with the sideburns who always makes eyes at you in the Gallows—should I keep going?"

"No," he says shortly. Hawke shrugs and eats another handful of almonds; Fenris hesitates a moment, and then, his ears heating, asks, "Do you like them?"

Hawke smiles, her eyes softening, and leans over to kiss him. "What do you think?"

She tastes like salt and the sweetness of honey, and when she pulls back she grins and pokes an almond between his lips. He rolls his eyes but chews it, unable to muster any true ire, and when Hawke drops another kiss on his nose he cannot stop his smile. She digs her hand back into the bag—and then her face changes abruptly.

"What in the _world_—"

"Hawke?"

"What is this, Fenris?" she asks, and unfurls her hand to show him a piece of molded, painted chocolate half-wrapped in shining silver foil.

Fenris closes his eyes to block out the sight of the Knight-Commander staring up at them both with an angry chocolate-drop frown. "A gift," he says, "from an…admirer."

"Oh?" Hawke looks down at the chocolate contemplatively. "Perhaps I'm the one with a tumultuous affair."

"I think _not_," Fenris growls, and Hawke bursts into laughter as he topples her over into the pillows. It doesn't matter, he thinks, if his stolen mansion feels nothing like home; his home is _here_, with Hawke, regardless of the walls that surround him and the shadows that they cast, and he will not give his callow fears another instant's foothold in either his life or hers.

The morning sunlight falls in fat bars from Hawke's tall windows, spilling like water over the coverlet and the white canvas bag with the crimson ribbon. Dust swirls up in lazy golden circles from the hearth, from the pile of silk organza and black trousers by the mirror, from the scarred and shining footboard; the brilliant, cloudless sky outside is a sunlit testament to the passing of the storm, and at their feet the tiny chocolate Meredith lies forgotten in a gleaming spill of salted, honeyed almonds.

.

.

.

end.


End file.
